BUG: [SW 6.04] Watch is completely blocked for 10 minutes after longpress of the light button. No way to stop it, just need to wait 10 minutes.

Normally the help alarm should be triggered by light-longpress. Also a countdown should first be displayed to allow abortion of the procedure before it starts.

In my case, when I have all radios deactivated (Bluetooth off, WLAN off, no LTE SIM configured), when I longpress the light button for ca. 5-10 sec or so, bad things happen:

First of all, there is no countdown dialog. Instead the watch immediately tries to sends the alarm and shows an info accordingly.

It continues trying this for exactly 10 minutes, although this is useless, since the watch should know that all radio interfaces are switched off!

During these 10 Minutes, there is no way to interrupt this dialog! I tried short- and long-presses of all buttons - to no avail at all, watch just wouldn't react whatsoever. First I thought the watch is now frozen until it rund out of battery, but then, after 10 minutes, it finally gave up and I could use my watch again. Bad enough though!

Please remove this bug!

0 NormalGarminUser over 2 years ago

Meanwhile, I found out that I can "shortcut" the 10 minutes blocking time by enforcing a restart by a "very very long"-longpress of the light button (ca. 15-20 sec).

But that's the only way - other than waiting 10 minutes - to avoid the blocking time.

What I think should happen is that the watch should discover by itself that all radio functions are off and that it can hence not send the alarm, and it should not be blocked for 10 minutes but at least provide the option to unblock the watch without a restart.

0 FlowState over 2 years ago

That's interesting because I've never set up LTE, and when I do the same thing, a prompt appears asking me to "Set up assistance using the Garmin Connect app". For me, it makes no difference whether bluetooth and WLAN are on or off.

I'm wondering if you've previously set up LTE then subsequently removed that set up (if that's even possible), and maybe that's trigger for this bug?

If hold the button for much longer, then the watch shuts off, just as in your case. On a side note I'm not too thrilled about this -- seems like if I actually used the LTE emergency assistance feature, then I would be worried about accidentally calling for help when I just want to do a "force shutdown/power off" of the watch, as opposed to turning it off normally. There's also the danger that you hold that LIGHT button down too long when you actually need assistance, and just turn the watch off (although I don't know exactly what this would look like in practice, since I've never had LTE configured.)

I think the way Apple handles this kind of feature is better. On an iPhone, if you hold Volume Up and the side button for a few seconds, you're prompted with two sliders (normal power off, and SOS). If you continue to hold those buttons, you get a countdown for the SOS feature, and you have to keep holding the buttons for the countdown.

If you want to force shutdown your phone, you have to press volume up, volume down, then hold the power button. Of course this makes it harder to do a force shutdown, but I think the assumption is this should be a rare occurrence.

0 NormalGarminUser over 2 years ago in reply to FlowState

Neither have I ever set up LTE on my watch. What I did setup however is an emergency contact email address (namely my other own email address, for testing purposes, and it works, when the watch is BT-connected to my phone the emergency email is being sent out). Maybe that's why the dialogue that you mention does not show up in my case for the same test.

And I agree with your usability judgement.

I also think that a "call emergency action" should be as fool-proof as possible and without interactions (maybe I am in a situation where I cannot look at my watch, or the display is damaged), so a plain-simple loooooong-press should be the action that calls the emergency, whereas a forced restart could be an action that involves some interactivity - because this normally happens in a situation with good conditions for man & machine.

0 FlowState over 2 years ago in reply to NormalGarminUser

NormalGarminUser said:
I also think that a "call emergency action" should be as fool-proof as possible and without interactions (maybe I am in a situation where I cannot look at my watch, or the display is damaged), so a plain-simple loooooong-press should be the action that calls the emergency, whereas a forced restart could be an action that involves some interactivity - because this normally happens in a situation with good conditions for man & machine.

I agree that the "call emergency action" should be simple (for the same reasons) -- it's why Apple also allows you to make an emergency call by pressing the side button five times (although that can be turned off).

I think there does need to be a way to do forced restart without interactivity -- one of the purposes of forced restart is that it's a last ditch way to restart your device when it's not working.